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“Good morning, sleepyheads. Come to the table. Mr. Warren and Ginny are here for breakfast, and then Mr. Warren is going to fix the locks on the doors.”
Not budging a step farther, Grace glanced at the back door. “Did that man come back?”
“No. No, he won’t come back. The police took him away, remember?”
“C’mon, dummy, move!” Connor pushed from behind and stomped past his stumbling sister into the kitchen. “I’m hungry.” In the middle of the room, though, he stopped short and pointed at Ginny. “She’s in my chair.”
Valerie nodded at the space next to Rob. “We brought in a new chair for you. Grace, come sit beside me.”
“I’m not sitting next to her.” Connor walked around to his usual place. “Give me my chair.”
Ginny stared at him with a challenge in her eyes. “No.”
“Ginny—” Rob started.
“Mommy,” Connor whined, “I want my chair.”
She took his hand and led him to the other side of the table. “You will sit here. Or you won’t eat.” Her son slouched into the disputed seat. With his arms crossed over his chest, his cheeks puffed and lower lip stuck out, he resembled a grouchy frog.
Ignoring him, Valerie looked at her daughter. “Come sit down, Grace, before the food gets cold.” After another moment of hesitation, Grace sidled in behind the table to sit next to her brother, who promptly blew a raspberry at her.
“Hey.” Rob’s hand closed over Connor’s shoulder. “That’s no fair.”
Connor turned his freckled face toward Rob. “What do you mean?”
“You can’t blow raspberries without a reason.”
“Who says?”
“It’s the rule.”
“Whose rule?”
“Everybody knows raspberries don’t count unless the other guy—or girl—did something to you first.” With a shrug, Rob sat back in his seat. “That’s the law of the land.”
With eyebrows lowered and lips pursed, Connor stared at him for a long time. At last, he turned to Valerie. “Can I have some eggs now?”
“Please,” she reminded him.
He rolled his eyes. “Can I please have some eggs now?”
“Good man,” Rob told him with a grin.
Valerie watched as Connor started to smile back, then quickly reverted to his standard belligerent attitude. After a year of his moods, she’d begun to wonder if the cheerful little boy she’d once known would ever reappear. Thanks to Rob Warren, she now saw that he still lurked beneath the mask—daunted but not gone forever.
Once the kids cleared the table after breakfast, Ginny returned to her chair and Grace and Connor went to get dressed. Valerie attempted to load the dishwasher without Rob’s help.
“I can do that,” he insisted. “You cooked. I want to clean up.”
“I will finish the kitchen,” she said through gritted teeth. “Sit down and drink your tea or go for a walk around the block. But don’t stand here in my way.”
A knock at the front door forestalled his answer. She started to leave the kitchen, then turned back. “Don’t touch the dishwasher,” she warned. “Or heads will roll.”
He put up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Ginny and I will come along so you can keep an eye on me.”
“Good idea.” When she reached the door, she found two good-looking guys in shorts, T-shirts and sneakers standing on the porch.
The taller one spoke first. “Ms. Manion? I’m Dixon Bell, and this is Adam DeVries. Rob Warren gave us a call about your doors?”
Rob stepped up behind her. “About time y’all showed up. I was beginning to think I’d have to hang these doors by myself.”
“God f-forbid,” Adam DeVries said. “You’d never get them square.”
“Wait a minute.” Valerie shook her head. “I thought I read in the paper…saw somewhere…that the name of the mayor is DeVries.”
The dark-haired man smiled at her. “That’s me. And on b-behalf of New Skye, I’d like to w-welcome you and your f-family to the city. We’re glad to h-have you.” His gaze dropped to the doorknob and he scowled. “Although this is not at all the kind of reception you should have gotten. I’ll be talking to the police chief.”
“Adam owns a construction business,” Rob said over her shoulder. “And when he’s not putting down other people’s best efforts, he does a good job. Dixon has done a lot of restoration work on his own house, so he’s another one you can trust to get your doors hung right.”
She felt as if she was being swept along by a river of masculinity. “I really don’t want to bother you—”
“It’s no bother.” Dixon smiled, and she realized he was nearly as handsome as Rob, with a moonlight-and-magnolias accent all his own. “We’re glad to help a new neighbor.”
Adam pulled a tape measure out of his pocket and reached to the top of her door. “All we have to do is m-measure, then we can get the right-size d-doors and get on with the j-job.” The mayor seemed quieter than his friends, but his steady gaze was reassuring. Valerie decided he had her vote.
“We’ll need to measure the back door and check out the frame,” Rob warned. “That’s got to be replaced, too.”
The men were soon deep into a cryptic conversation involving tools, wood and screws. Valerie stood her ground, trying to understand, hoping to remain an active part of the process. In the end, however, she assured Rob that Ginny was welcome to stay with her while he went for supplies and then watched helplessly from the front porch as the three of them got into a white pickup truck and drove off.
When she turned back into the house, Ginny stood nearby. “What am I supposed to do now?”
Valerie called up her most encouraging smile. “Well, let’s go find out what Grace is up to.” She led Ginny down the hallway to Grace’s bedroom, only to find the door closed. “Grace, are you okay?”
Her daughter opened the door to create a narrow crack she could peer through. “Yes.” Her glance flicked to Ginny and then away.
“Ginny’s here while her dad has gone to get the new doors. I thought the two of your might find something to do together.”
The hesitation in Grace’s face was easy to read, and Valerie felt sure Ginny saw it. But after a long moment, the door opened all the way.
“Sure,” her daughter said, with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “Come in.”
Valerie stepped to the side, giving Ginny room to pass. She could practically feel the temperature drop below freezing. “I’m going to help Connor unpack his room,” she told them. “He’s been waiting all week. So, you two…um…have fun.”
The two girls stared at her, their expressions a similar mix of impatience, resentment and uncertainty. Valerie turned her back and escaped to the simple world of the seven-year-old male. Maybe there she could establish a position of authority.
As she reached Connor’s door, a foam missile hit her in the face.
Then again, maybe not.
GRACE RETREATED to her bed, leaving the other girl the rest of the room. After a couple of minutes, the girl came in—you couldn’t call it walking, exactly, with the crutches. She stopped in the middle of the rug, looked around but didn’t say anything.
“What do you want to play?” Grace said at last, just to end the silence.
“I don’t care,” the girl said without looking at Grace.
“Do you like dolls?”
“Dolls are for babies.”
Grace glanced at her favorites, all lined up on the bed. She hoped they hadn’t heard. “Um…I have puzzles.”
“Boring.”
She didn’t see how they could play dress up. And she didn’t want to play dress up with the girl, anyway. “We could build with Lego’s. Or play Life.”
The girl sighed, went to the chair at the desk and sat down. Grace gasped when she remembered that she’d left her diary there, open. She started to jump up and grab it out from under the girl’s face.
But the girl didn’t seem to notice the diary. “So what happened last night? Did some guy really try to break down your door?”
“Yes.” She shivered when she thought about it.
“Did he make a lot of noise?”
“N-not at first. It got louder, the more he tried.”
“Were you awake the whole time?” The girl seemed really excited. She hadn’t said this much in the entire first week of school.
“I don’t think so. Mom came to get us and took us to her room, then called the police.”
“And you just sat and listened until they came?”
Grace nodded, then swallowed the lump in her throat at the memory.
“Scary, huh? What were you going to do if he got in before the cops came?”
“My mother—” She remembered just in time. Tell nobody. Absolutely no one. “I don’t know.”
But the girl didn’t believe her. “What were you going to say? Your mother…?”
“My mother locked the bedroom door. We were safe enough until the police came.”
The girl’s pale eyes narrowed. “I don’t think that’s what you meant. I think you were going to say something else.”
She gripped her bedspread with both hands. “No, I wasn’t. That’s all.”
Now the girl did turn to the desk, and she picked up the diary. “I could keep this and give it to your little brother.”
Grace jumped to her feet. “You can’t do that. It’s mine.”
“And if you try to take it away, I’ll tell your mother you were hitting me.” The girl gave a fake smile. “Nobody likes it when you beat up on a cripple.”
“Please, give it back.”
“Tell me what you started to say.”
“I—I can’t. I promised not to.”
“Okay.” She shrugged and then wiggled to her feet, with the diary caught in her hand next to the crutch. “I’ll go see your little brother.”
“Wait. Stop.” Grace took a deep breath. It wouldn’t hurt to tell what. She wouldn’t say where. “I’ll tell you.”
“I’m listening.”
“I—” She glanced at the door, as if her mother could hear.
“Well?”
“My mother has a gun.” Grace dragged in a deep breath. “We sat on the bed facing the door, and she loaded and cocked the gun. If the guy had come in, she was going to blow his head off.”
“Could she do that?”
“She took shooting lessons. I think she could.”
“Wow.” The girl set the diary on the desk. “That’s cool.”
Grace reached out and grabbed the little book, hugging it close to her chest and ran back to her bed.
“But she didn’t get to shoot him, did she?”
“No.” She finished stuffing the book under the mattress, then turned and sat down on top of it. “The police came.”
“Can I see it? The gun?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
This time, she had an answer ready. “My mom hides it. I don’t know where she keeps it.”
“We could look for it.”
“She’d figure out pretty fast what we were looking for. And then we’d get in trouble.” Major trouble, since Grace wasn’t supposed to have said anything in the first place.
“Too bad.” The girl sighed. “That would have been fun.” They both sat and did nothing for a few minutes. “Does your boom box work?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have any decent music?”
